What 15% Gets You

I have to say I absolutely love the new credit card functionality that’s hit all the NYC cabs in the past few months. This is tremendously convenient for a couple of reasons. One, it means not being dependent on the availability of your bank’s ATMs. And two, the taxi card-swiper calculates your tip for you! This is a godsend for people like me who struggle with the basics of math – including, but not limited to: adding, subtracting, and multiplying.

The swiper functionality is such that it gives you, I think, three tip options: 10%, 15%, and 20%. I usually choose 15% - sometimes 10% and never 20%. The other night I was leaving a party with my friend Joe and we walked together to Times Square to hail cabs. He said that he always gives cab drivers two or three dollars, no matter what the fare. Ludicrous on the face of it, this rule actually makes a smidgeon of sense to me once I do the math. In my case, most of my cab rides seem to hover between $15 and $20. Conveniently, a 15% tip for these fares would be around two or three bucks as well. Good rule!

It’s not that I take a lot of cabs, but I seem to have done in the past week. I don’t like doing it because I already pay $81 a month to ride the train. One cab ride on one night can easily set me back a week’s worth of subway rides. Think about that. All the same, there is little I hate more than waiting on a sweaty late-night subway platform for some miserable line like the D or the W or the fucking V.

Last week I went to see Evan at Parkside Lounge and afterwards we headed to the Delancey Street F, a miserable little trench in the best of times, made worse by the late hour. We actually stopped at an apocalyptically noxious McDonalds on Delancey and Essex so I could pee. We then headed down to the station and Evan went for the M train. Now, the M train is a pretty crappy line, and normally I would say that only losers take it. However, in this case, Evan only had to go as far as Fulton Street, which was just four stops away. I, on the other hand, faced a long trek all the way up to Columbus Circle and then a transfer to the 1 to 110th Street. I think I stood on the platform for about two minutes and then I was like “fuck it.” I came back up to street-level and hailed a cab on Delancey and listened to the news on my iPhone all the way up the West Side Highway.

All the Sad Old Literary Men

I recently finished a book called All the Sad Young Literary Men, written by Keith Gessen, who is the editor of the literary magazine n+1. This is not so much a novel as a series of short stories. They all center on overeducated east coast quarterlifers coping with unsatisfying relationships and hindered artistic ambitions. They are literary and they are sad and they are men, but are they young? On this, Gessen is conclusive: they are not. Not anymore. Not after they’ve graduated from their Ivy League universities and attended grad schools and ensconced themselves in overpriced Brooklyn apartments. Gessen’s message here seems to be: by the time you’ve written your thesis and defended it – by the time you’re out of school, in other words - you are officially old, or you will be very, very soon.

The trouble is, most of the guys in Gessen’s novel (they’re all a bit interchangeable) are around my age, or perhaps a little bit older. This made the experience of reading the book rather disturbing, at times. Was I, I wondered, as old as Gessen’s protagonists? By the numbers, it seemed so, but I felt downright sprightly next to most of these bitter veterans. Take the following descriptions as evidence:

In reference to a young writer, contemplating a novel he’s beginning:
“He was getting to be a certain age, he thought. It was the age when his never-to-be-written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was still going to write.”

Referring to a history graduate student at Syracuse University, after being discovered by his students literally passed out at the gym (2 passages):
“No one wanted to see a man this sweaty, and this old, leaving stains all over the equipment.”

“Mark for his part sat up slowly, and then made his old-man’s dignified way to the dressing room.”

More poignantly, referring to the same history student, now finished with school and living in Brooklyn with his girlfriend:
“They both fell asleep then, in the Brooklyn night, two people no longer very young, no longer very happy, though still unsettled, still a mess.”

And, finally, in the book’s epilogue, the narrator contemplating his girlfriend’s pregnancy:
“She was too young to be having babies, and I, I was too old.”

Get the picture? I’m twenty-seven and Keith Gessen is about five years older than me so maybe he has some insight into the process of urban, intellectual aging that I haven’t yet acquired. However, it’s alarming to find that the thread linking these collected stories of intellectual, literary youth in the Thousands is not the dread of living in an age of terrorism and governmental hypocrisy, but rather the burden of mortality! And these are folks in their late twenties! “There were so many things I’d once wanted to do!” declaims one character late in the book. Well, me too, but at least I’m not trudging through life already teathered to my own tombstone. At twenty-seven, I’d like to think I’m just getting started on many things. Besides, I really only feel old when I go out to Columbia bars. Or, of course, when I read books by Keith Gessen.